


Still Loving You

by zeldar



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst and Fluff, Drunken Flirting, Drunken Kissing, First Kiss, First Time, M/M, Mutual Pining, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-02
Updated: 2019-07-02
Packaged: 2020-06-02 13:23:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19442314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeldar/pseuds/zeldar
Summary: “What if it all ends?” Crowley’s hand was outstretched and his eyes were distant like he was looking off to something else, a future where there weren’t any more moments like this: moments of sinking into the wine they’d had at dinner, footsteps light as they saunter through the sleeping streets to get back to someone’s place, “What if we fail?”***Where Crowley and Aziraphale become close friends with drunken mistakes.





	Still Loving You

“What if it all ends?” Crowley’s hand was outstretched and his eyes were distant like he was looking off to something else, a future where there weren’t any more moments like this: moments of sinking into the wine they’d had at dinner, footsteps light as they saunter through the sleeping streets to get back to someone’s place, “What if we fail?” 

Ah, the apocalypse. Faithful was the Lord’s promise to destroy as surely as create, leaving that creation to prosper fruitlessly much like a young boy’s wait to see an ant colony thrive before inevitably crushing it under his shoe. And they were apart of it, the angel and the demon, though it was unclear if they were of the civilization they mourned to lose or just a part of the rubber sole, acquainting itself more than it should’ve at the will of a petulant god. 

“We‒” Aziraphale starts and stops, the dark vision Crowley’s question elicits dampens what would otherwise be a cheerful evening. He just frowns, pensive, trying to summarize his sorrows, “There’s so much I haven’t yet done.” 

It’s a silly reason to wish against the end of the world, in fact it’s rather shallow of Aziraphale, but Crowley understands. There’s an endless frustration in being robbed of a world that, despite your better judgement, you’d hoped would live on to ravel itself into new and interesting shapes indefinitely. It’s a grief that might be understandable to anyone, but it can only be felt in full by those two souls making their rounds on the London streets in that unseasonably quiet night. 

“Exactly! Exactly, you’ve never even…” Crowley pauses, thinks, and hiccups simultaneously, “Nah, can’t think of it. What haven’t you done again?” 

Aziraphale’s lips dip with the weight of someone who’s rethinking their argument, stating lamely, “Well, I’ve never been to Texas.” 

Crowley had been to Texas one fateful summer and desired never again to return. This was apparent in his sour expression and his vague but all-too-revealing, “Yeah, not missing much there.” 

“I haven’t broken any of the Ten Commandments.” It was impossible to tell whether this was a brag or a confession, and he amended, “Well, none of the important ones, anyways. But then again, I have no desire to.” 

Crowley’s left brow got a bit cozier to his hairline. “Which are the important ones?” He asked, though he had an idea. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ came to mind as did a certain French executioner who might beg to differ, if he still had his head. 

Aziraphale rambled off the ones he hadn’t broken and Crowley was pleased to find he was right about not killing being pretty important, though if ghosts were real one could hear the ghastly groan of _“le meurtrier”_ echoing furiously around them. The angel carefully omitted those sins he had committed with chagrin; it was something he wouldn’t share with the leagues of heaven or hell, just Crowley. 

Adultery was also on the list, a bit to Crowley’s surprise, “Oh, so you never got around to, y’know…” He was a demon, and thus had no need of shame, but couldn’t stop from censoring himself, “I thought you and Oscar Wilde might’ve‒” 

“No, I’ve never.” He said, without any of the excess remorse that a human in his situation might impose, “You have?” 

For some reason, in all his time, Aziraphale never considered Crowley to be a sexual being. He certainly never spoke of it, and the whole thing seemed to be beneath the two of them. But, after giving it a moment’s thought it made sense, and Aziraphale on the whole felt quite embarrassed that he hadn’t assumed it in the first place, given that his counterpart was a demon. 

“Well, obviously.” Crowley said. He was a demon, after all. It wouldn’t go over too well with the guys back home if he hadn’t. 

“Oh. Well, was it...enjoyable?” Aziraphale asked with as much nonchalance as he could manage, but after centuries of living among humanity it was impossible not to develop a taste for their social standards, and the topic threatened a blush across his face. At least, he told himself that this was the reason he was near-blushing while his subconscious privately enjoyed the fact that his discomfort was not due to his humanity, but rather his largely unspoken affection for the demon. But, no, he was resolutely not a jealous creature. 

“Yeah, it was alright. You ought to try it before the world kicks the bucket, that’s for sure.” Crowley didn’t know _why_ Aziraphale should try it, or why he said he should. It was probably because the idea of Aziraphale and sex and Crowley all in the same conversation evoked a curious feeling that he apprehensively ached to explore. 

“Me?” Aziraphale questioned, wondering with whom the demon thought he was speaking to, and shaking his head with fierce objection, “No, I don’t think it suits me. No, not at all. I could never.” 

But the traitorous beginnings of lust began to unfurl within the angel’s mind, try as he might to squash them down. 

Crowley barked a laugh, mainly at the angel’s tone, “C’mon, I’ve made you try worse.” 

That was true. Aziraphale recalled a time in the latest 60s where Crowley had exercised his trickster nature and got the angel to eat a ‘special’ cookie. It had gone down, well, like a lead balloon (some people just aren’t meant to behold the miraculous effects of marijuana) and Crowley had repented dearly, his penance being to take the angel out for a post-high‒but still heavily subjected to the munchies‒dinner and to swear to never again give Aziraphale recreational drugs as long as they both lived. Crowley remembered the incident as well and shuddered to think that he’d almost given the angel something stronger, convinced that he narrowly escaped with his life. 

Aziraphale wrinkled his nose in distaste, both at remembering his brief stint with drugs and due to the topic at hand, “It’s never interested me. It seems complicated.” 

“Complicated?” Crowley echoed, “Not really. People have been doing it since the dawn of, well, people! You must’ve saw Adam and Eve going at it, too.” Crowley wagged his eyebrows with a crooked smirk. 

Back before there was such a thing as modesty, Aziraphale had tried his best to find it endearing or to pay no attention to it at all, “Yes, of course. But I meant that I’d have to go out and find somebody, and without using a miracle! I wouldn’t know where to begin.” 

Then there was the issue of Aziraphale and his knowledge of those silly, human notions about sex. And romance. And, heaven forbid, love. He couldn’t even look at Crowley with all that white noise buzzing around provocatively in his head. 

“Ah.” Crowley said, seemingly quieted with a tone that held none of his earlier mirth. Aziraphale tried to place the cause for this change, musing that perhaps the reality of flirting and dating as an immortal angel had dawned at last. In fact, at the moment the demon had gone all tight-lipped and distant, a touch of tension bringing down the edge of his brow. 

What Aziraphale couldn’t know was that Crowley was currently engaged in a fearsome internal debate about the implications of the near-rage that thinking about Aziraphale in some dusty old bar talking up one of the locals produced. He brought the bottle of wine that they’d miraculously slipped out of the restaurant to his lips and pulled from it deeply, some of the angst in his expression melting away as he decided to not worry about such things, and the bottle sloshed loudly in a way that prognosticated a drunken stupor. Aziraphale certainly didn’t watch as he swallowed and, if he did, he most absolutely wasn’t mulling over what Crowley had suggested. 

They walked in silence for a bit, both lost in thought, passing the bottle back and forth without real purpose. It was relaxing to hear a set of footsteps accompanying his own as they passed from the wide, meandering streets to the close-cut alleyways that would eventually deposit them in front of Aziraphale’s bookshop, if either of them thought about it enough. It would be more relaxing if Aziraphale wasn’t wondering whether or not Crowley would linger on, coming on inside to enjoy a round of late-night chats fueled with their respective drinks, or wave a tired goodbye before speeding away in his shining black car. Both options left a sleeping sort of pining in his chest that he tried to drown out with the remainder of the wine, or, what would’ve been the remainder of the wine if someone hadn’t refilled it‒he didn’t know who. To the angel’s dismay, or possibly delight, but likely dismay as he enjoyed having full function of his limbs, he found it increasingly difficult to walk in a straight line. Crowley was struggling with his own serpentine saunter, the angel noticed, it was taking him in lazy zigzags across the narrow alleyway which Aziraphale took great care to avoid. 

Aziraphale was thinking of asking outright if the demon would stay a few hours longer, if only to fend off those bleak wonderings about the impending apocalypse, when he spoke. His voice was immensely more slurred and Aziraphale could feel the heat of it in his words, which caught in the recesses of his throat, “Angel, y’know, if you’d wanted to, er, experiment...you could’ve always asked.” 

“Hmm?” Aziraphale dragged, not quite caught up to where Crowley’s thoughts were, looking to the demon with his face earnest and, this time, focused on what the demon was saying. 

“Well, I was just thinking…” Crowley’s words tapered into their consonants, particularly the ‘s’ which sounded a bit like a hiss to anybody who knew his true origins, “It’d be downright hilarious, wuddunit? An angel an’ a demon goin’ at it?” 

Aziraphale almost stopped walking. Suddenly, the heat of the night was getting to him and as his inhuman heart stumbled over its next beat he knitted and unknitted his fingers. Thankfully, he didn’t stop walking, catching the glint of Crowley’s smiling teeth just in time and bubbling over with a pained relief as he realized the demon was teasing. And then, all that was left was to let the tension drop from his shoulder and force out a laugh, seamlessly sliding away from that heart-stopping shock that’d gripped him when he thought Crowley was being serious. 

Crowley’s joking was real, as was his nervousness. Far from Aziraphale’s sight he toyed with the edge of his shirt anxiously awaiting the angel’s return, and when he heard the angel laugh the air left him like a rapidly deflating balloon and he laughed along in the same way anyone does when something they weren’t sure was a joke is received as one. Meanwhile, a tiny part of him protested, curling into itself like a lump of tangled black yarn. 

“You’re drunk.” Aziraphale managed at last, after barely a moment. 

_So are you._ He’d expected Crowley to say, but he didn’t. Aziraphale looked over to find that Crowley was still staring determinedly at the ground, his glasses hanging a bit lopsided from his face, expression altogether unreadable. He hadn’t even heard the angel it seemed, as he kept rambling on, “Actually, ya think they’d punish us? Surely they’d punish us.”

“Crowley, dear.” Aziraphale says, pained, because they’d be punished as surely as the first humans were knocked out of the garden. But not for Aziraphale’s lust, no. For his lust he is given a slap on the wrist, a reminder from heaven, but for his love he is given _the fall._ And he’s thought about it, of course, showing Crowley his love through physical affection like humans do, but while a misguided exploration into human customs would be justifiable to heaven, the possibility of them having an entire, drawn-out, intimate relationship would turn his wings blacker than the London night sky. And he’d shudder to think of hell’s backlash against Crowley.

Aziraphale wished Crowley would drop it. But, it seemed that the demon was almost incapable of letting it go. He was burning with it, footsteps coming quicker and more haphazardly, arms coming up to gesture with it, something about the possibility of them getting intimate had struck the demon. Aziraphale thought it was comedy. Crowley knew from his own misfortune anxiety that is was something far worse, and while the sober part of his mind begged him to shut up he found himself incapable of it. 

“Would you shag me?” Crowley said, then blinked as he realized he hadn’t at all said what he’d meant to ask, clarifying hastily, “I mean, if you wanted to. I mean, hell, I mean do ya think you’d be smote where you stand, hellfire and whatnot?” 

It wasn’t a clear question at all. Aziraphale swallowed harshly, overcome by a sudden parchedness that conflicted greatly with his sudden desire to be sober. Or, maybe much more drunk. He performed a minor miracle, then, though it was of no angelic origin, by ignoring Crowley’s question. Instead, he laughed aloud, swore to himself that the whole thing was a joke, and clapped the demon excitedly on the back like he was some vulgar american watching the wrong sort of football, “Why, I thought you’d just said you’d wanted me to sh‒ try it out with...other people?”

Crowley, bless him, or, rather, damn him, laughed along and waved his hand dismissively, “Yeah, sssure! Go for it, shag all ye want...call that Wilde guy, I dun care. I’s just curious if I could, y’know, _tempt_ you.” 

There was a version of Crowley, quite miniature, that resided in the back of his mind that was currently very sober and very loudly shouting. Drunk Crowley wondered if Aziraphale could hear the desperately forced nonchalance that, to his own ears, seemed to ooze from his lips. Aziraphale was too busy wondering that if the demon’s serpent sense could somehow detect the way the angel’s throat had suddenly adopted the climate of the Sahara. 

“What?” He said. 

Crowley’s canines, or as Aziraphale had affectionately termed in his mind from time to time and what name came surfacing now at the most inappropriate time, his fangs, shone wetly as he pulled up his lips in a grin aimed fully at Aziraphale, “Well, ‘m rather good at it. Ya think I could, I dunno, seduce you? Getchu in trouble. If I wanted to.” 

Somewhere, sober Crowley was banging his head against a wall. 

“To‒to have… intercourse, you mean?” Aziraphale stammered, and stopped breathing. 

And then Crowley was there, all temptation and sin. A subtle flick of his lips and the air became taut, thick and warm and heavy all over them. If he wasn’t an angel, Aziraphale’s head would spin. As it was, he felt lightheaded, especially as Crowley spoke, his words dribbling out of him like seduction-soaked ichor, “To _fuck_ me.” 

Crowley, in actuality, had only barely leaned in, unsure of himself. And his voice had caught as he spoke, wondering what the hell he was doing. What he was asking. Wondering why he wanted to lean, no, knowing why he wanted to lean in and knowing that just as it had been for the last several thousand years it was now. An apocalypse didn’t change anything. 

There was a horrible moment where Aziraphale was completely silent and Crowley’s heart, if it weren’t subjected to the mortal laws of physics, would have tumbled right out of his chest. And then the demon was backing up, tilting his head and laughing and just about falling over from how drunk he was. 

“I’m an angel.” Aziraphale said, a little breathless, over the sound of Crowley’s laughter. He sounds almost offended, “I can’t be tempted.” He was a filthy liar. 

Crowley’s smile slid half-off his face, and he said pointedly, “I was joking, angel.” 

“I know you were!” Aziraphale claims, but his rapid pulse and the fluttering in his stomach disagrees,“I was reminding you, of course.” He began to relax, the moment of tension seemingly gone, “And even if...anything, well, I’d not know what I was doing. It’d be a right embarrassment.” 

“No, that’s…” Crowley doesn’t know what to say, and he swallows around his words, “Humans are properly weird. I’m a demon and I wouldn’t give you shite about it.” 

“You wouldn’t?” Aziraphale asks, and it has the audacity to make him warm. 

“No.” Crowley said, “Demon I may be, but, well, I mean, it’s not your fault that you’re an angel and all. Not like you’ve gone around practicing an’ whatnot. In fact they ought to find it endearing, or whatever, ‘tis noble I reckon, to humans. S’no I wouldn’t...er...make funuvya. We’re proper friends ‘an all.”

Aziraphale just beams at Crowley, and then he can hear it in his voice, that latent, blushing sweetness that makes Aziraphale realize just how much they both love one another. He wants to tell him how wonderfully nice that is, but thinks better of it. Instead, he shows him, taking him by the collar and planting a kiss firmly to his mouth. It’s a little off-mark, a little off-balance, but satisfying enough as Crowley first startles and then relaxes underneath him with the distinct impression of someone coming home after a very long day.

When he pulls away he’s not met with another kiss, or arms snaking around him, or anything reassuring. It’s just Crowley’s confusion as he opens his mouth to start speaking, closes it, eyes fumbling down and back up to Aziraphale’s before at last he asks, “What are you doing, angel?” 

And Aziraphale looks heartbroken, “You tempted me.” 

“You said‒” 

“I lied.” 

Crowley can’t help himself, then, reaching out and planting one hand just barely against the angel’s waist, “And heaven?” 

Aziraphale stalls, head falling, “I’m...I’m loyal to heaven. I won’t fall Crowley. I won’t fall to sin.” 

“This is a sin.” Crowley says, and shakes with it. Trembles from the weight of it. It must be a sin. One so old that the demons and angels and God shouldn’t even have to warn of it, which is exactly why it lunges at you, in full vision, because you were so focused on what was in your peripheral. 

Aziraphale shakes his head, and his breath catches. He captures Crowley’s jaw and cheek in his palm, thumbs over the flesh there, and leans in so close their foreheads touch, “No...no, this is a _mistake_. One I will repent dearly for, when it’s over. But, there are some things I simply must try.” 

And then they kiss again, fiercely, without an ounce of fight left in it. Their next moments are filled with a delicious warmth, felt acutely, without any time spare to worry about heaven or hell or the seven point six billion other lives buzzing away on the planet. Very quickly they were desperate for a bedroom and found themselves landing on top of Aziraphale’s comforter without much thought about it. They went lazily, urgently, the angel’s fingertips shaking so badly he couldn’t unfasten the demon’s clothes, the demon stiffening as the angel brushed his ticklish skin and their hands interlaced and squeezing together so much that it hurt them both. Their breaths mingle as they laugh through the obstacles, those moments where they took each other for what they were. They relished each touch and mourned it in the same moment, ruining each other as they went. It was a mistake with the same pure corruption as that first sin in the garden, where the serpent tempted and the angel looked the other way. 

Afterwards, they lie. Crowley chews his lip, checks Aziraphale’s features, and sighs. Aziraphale taps his fingertips against his pulse point, eyes Crowley’s ravaged mouth, and wishes away the red mark cooling against his throat. They both want to reach for each other. Neither of them do. They just look, and long. 

“How was it?” Crowley says, his voice quiet. 

“More than ‘alright.’’ Aziraphale replies and adjusts his position just for an excuse to look away from Crowley’s eyes. 

Crowley rolls to look at the ceiling, “For me, too.” 

“I’m sorry.” Aziraphale says, and means it. 

“It’s okay.” Crowley says, and doesn’t. But it’s okay, because Aziraphale knows. And the demon gets up, and in a moment’s time he’s cleaned and redressed, “I should probably...I have tempting to do, and‒” 

Aziraphale nods. 

Crowley pauses, says something he shouldn’t, “You alright?” 

“Of course.” 

Crowley swallows, does something he shouldn’t. He crosses the room and gives Aziraphale another kiss, it’s full of regret, not for what they’ve done but for the thought of heaven and hell and that they can never do it again, “Goodnight, angel.” 

He leaves swiftly, and as soon as he does Aziraphale sags against the bed, closing his eyes tightly and tries very hard to forget what they’d done. He tries hard to forget that flow of emotion, honeyed and brilliant, spilling from them both so thick that the angel could feel it cloy in the back of his throat. He tries hard to forget how he loves Crowley, and how he has for awhile, and that the demon loves him back and how in that fleeting moment where they were just a breathless entanglement of body that they’d mouthed it into each other's skin, the sound etched on the backside of Aziraphale’s beating heart for eternity. And then he tries to decide, if he were human, if he’d just fast-tracked himself into going to hell.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading this! If you can, please leave a comment telling me what you enjoyed. A big thanks to 630Kame (check out her fics!) for giving me feedback and giving me inspiration to post this fic, as well as many more writing friends who are just as obsessed with this ship as I am. I love you all! 
> 
> The title comes from ‘Still Loving You’ by Scorpions, which gave me the idea of this angsty scene where Crowley and Aziraphale sleep together on the pretense of it being casual when they both know it means more. Btw, the french in this fic means "murderer" implying that that the guy that Aziraphale swapped places with being guillotined has come back to haunt him lol.


End file.
